The trip down from Burpengary to Kyogle.

Travelling with the caravan attached to the back of our car is a lot slower than either of us had anticipated. We knew this from our Rockhampton trip,... but a 2.5 or 3 hour trip to Kyogle turned into a full day's drive with the van on the back.

For months I have been freaking out about driving to Kyogle via the Mount Lindesay Highway. It is the windiest bendiest narrowest nastiest most nausea-inducing stretch of road I have ever been on in my life! The thought of taking a caravan down there was just overwhelming. It was almost as stupid as Scott's plans to drive the van along the Great Ocean Road. [sigh] The only reason we took the Mount Lindesay Highway in the end was because my cousin Allen (a dude whose opinion we highly respect, especially with regard to driving and cars) had said that the road had been widened and he thought it would be OK to take a van down there.

Getting from Burpengary to a servo on the highway to Boondall on the Gateway Motorway took us an hour. One hour! It was at that point I knew we were going to get to Kyogle much later than the GPS estimated.

It was a really pretty drive. Once you get past Beaudesert and into the hills there are pretty houses, rustic sheds, birds, cows and a thousand picture perfect postcard scenes. It almost hurt me to see so much beauty and not be able to record it in some way. When I go on drives like that I wish I was a photographer. I think this trip will be hard for me to deal with, in that I will want to record it all in some way. I know I will be grieving for the stuff I can't quite capture. I know I'm a writer and that's what I do, but somehow it doesn't do it justice. This kind of beauty seems to need a higher art form, maybe poetry. Short sharp notes scratched in a tiny notebook as we rumble past at the speed of Commodore-with-16ft-van-attached seem barely sufficient. Beauty should be absorbed, contemplated, breathed in,... not glanced sideways through car windows and recounted in a blog. How lowbrow is that?

We arrived at the Kyogle Gardens Caravan Park at 4:30pm or 5:30pm daylight savings time.